This Week’s Need To Know

A couple of weeks ago, I used this feature to highlight some beneficial factors the UK gained by being a member state of the European Union. It was the 11th of June, 12 days before a record amount of voters (71.2%! More than 30 million people!) flocked to polling stations to make their decision. In that post I mentioned that, should Brexit become a reality, the future of our country would be uncertain. Yes, we had lots of well informed (to completely misinformed) guesstimations from experts and amateurs alike, but, realistically, nobody could predict with any accuracy what would happen.

Well, you know what happened. We voted leave. I watched the whole counting process unfold, ending with a breaking news report brought to us by the brilliant David Dimbleby that, despite my naïve hope that the polls would drastically alter in the last five minutes, the majority (52%) of British citizens had chosen to sever ties with the other 27 countries of the EU. I was devastated. As was the other 48% of the country. I watched in horror as Nigel Farage made his ‘dare to dream’ speech, which drew shocking parallels to Martin Luther King’s speech ‘I have a dream’, with one bitter irony; MLK was trying to unite citizens of different ethnicities – Farage was celebrating his success in convincing the majority that segregation was vital in his plight to ‘make Britain Great again’.

It’s been a week. The immediate outrage has died down, somewhat, and Tweets about Love Island have begun to slowly filter back into my timeline, but still we’re left wondering; what’s going to happen next? I’ll give a brief rundown of the effects that Brexit has had thus far, and – despite some harrowing revelations about the sheer amount of xenophobes residing in Britain – make the assured assumption that the ‘Leave’ campaigners are like those annoying mates we all have that convince us to leave a club at 2am ‘cos it’s shit’ but then not actually pull through with any other alternatives, and, despite being in a taxi home with some rubbish chips that cost a fiver, they’ll still be barking on that this was the best decision. Even though it wasn’t. And they know it.

David Cameron resigned, just over a year after being elected. (I was, initially, glad to see the back of that smug pig-fondler… until I realised who was most likely to take his place. BoJo.)

The Pound crumbled, hitting a 31 year low; it fell by 11 cents against the Euro and 16 cents against the US Dollar. It has since begun to climb, and is around 1.2% higher now than immediately after the result, but is still a lot weaker than it once was.

Farage lied. Not surprising, in fact, pretty inevitable, but he did it and we were angry about it. The famous ‘Leave’ buses claiming that the ‘£350million we pay into the EU each week will be put into our NHS’ (which was a lie in the first place; considering the gains we made in return, the figure was around £119million per week) seemed to have slipped from Farage’s mind as he insisted, on live morning TV, that he ‘can’t guarantee anything.’ Nice one, Nige.

Corbyn has been called to resign, with a vote of no confidence from his fellow Labour MP’s. At the time of writing, he’s standing his ground.

BoJo, contrary to earlier, petrifying assumptions, will not be entering the race for next Tory leader – huzzah! Unfortunately, it does confirm that he genuinely did not have a clue what he was campaigning for, and is now way in over his peroxide-blonde head (I don’t care if he’s a natural blonde, I’m angry.)

In a hilarious turn of events, BoJo made his debut (hopefully) on a porn site! Pornhub to be exact. The video, of him giving a speech at a Vote Leave news conference, is captioned ‘Dumb British blonde F*cks 15 million people at once’. So great. So true.

And finally, the worst thing to come out of this whole shit-storm, is, although the 52% of Leave voters aren’t all racists, those that are now think that 52% of the country is like-minded in their hate. Reports, some accompanied by footage, have been flooding into news broadcasts of multiple, racially charged hate attacks.

If this is what taking our country back means (also, if someone could please clarify where it went in the first place) then I don’t want it. This isn’t Great Britain, this is Idiot Britain, and eventually – just like your mate who realised that the club we were just in wasn’t actually that bad, and heck, it was much better than heading home early, when all your mates are still dancing and drinking away – the Leavers will fall into a guilt-induced silence and try not to chunder out the window.